Windows Phone Starter Kit for RSS- free software for teachers in February

Some Free February Appy-ness with a new piece of free software for teachers from Microsoft every day in February. Many of these items are unknown heroes, but they all share two things in common: 1) They are useful for teachers or students and 2) they are free.

Windows Phone Starter Kit for RSS

After yesterday’s techie Windows Phone Starter Kit for Schools, I thought I’d continue with another techie one for Windows Phone. This time it’s a starter kit for RSS - to help you create a Windows Phone app which consists of news feeds from the web.

Yet again, today’s freebie isn’t for your average teacher! It requires a fair amount of technical skills, because it’s actually a starter kit to create a Windows Phone application which allows you to link to web-based news feeds in RSS format.

Why do I think this is useful to schools?

So far this month my children’s school has sent me 29 emails, and seven paper-based letters. That’s 34 different notices in just 25 days. And some of those emails contained over 20 different news items. That is simply too much for me to cope with (and I regularly miss stuff in that deluge). How about if the school just had a series of newsfeeds that were related to what I needed to know, and they were available on my phone. So instead of seeing tens of emails a month in my (already too overloaded) mailbox, I could quickly just scan for the latest news on my phone when I want to? (Okay, that’s only part of the problem solved - it would still require somebody at the school to take an editorial role and reduce the volume of communications to be more appropriate )